Courage is needed to confront the nation's unfinished business

June 1, 2005 — 10.00am

THE denial of our indigenous people has diminished us as a nation. This will continue until we have the courage to acknowledge the injustice that has been wrought. We must engage in negotiation of the unfinished business to achieve a just settlement followed by national reconciliation.

This must be built upon a constitutional pillar that will become the foundation stone of our future relationship. The stone of this pillar must be like a hard granite, polished by negotiation and agreement, that will withstand the ravages of time and change.

We must invigorate our organisations to respond to these new circumstances, and develop strategies of engagement and consultation reflective of our cultural imperatives.

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Aboriginal people must look to the potential that resides within our communities, our land estates and natural resources, and look to how we can utilise them to enhance our economic position while not compromising the cultural and social integrity of these estates.

Aboriginal people have fought long and hard to sustain our right to exist and to preserve our land, language and culture so that our young people can enjoy the rights and responsibilities of being an Aboriginal person. The land and the people are one. The onus is now on our young people to take up their responsibilities and take control of their lives and become contributors to our society in order to secure their future contentment.

Their strategies should not be determined by grant controllers and appointed administrators. It is neither productive nor acceptable to shelter behind a wall of perceived oppression and victimhood.

There are injustices in this world and the response to injustice must be forthright and immediate; our responses must be based on integrity and honesty.

We must fight to resolve the oppression of substance abuse and violence that permeates many sectors of our community, and we must find ways of engaging with the broader society without compromising the cultural integrity of our community and society.

Let us be responsible for our destiny and not just cop that which is dished out to us as though that is all that we are entitled to.

Let us do better for ourselves but also demand that governments do better than they have in the past. Efforts that were made by decent people in 1967 to gain a fair and just position for us have not resulted in any meaningful negotiation or resolution of our place in this nation.

The governments of today have unilaterally decided that we are to be mainstreamed and assimilated into a society that elevates the individual above traditions and values forged over more than 50,000 years around community and belonging in extended family relations centred on kinship rules and responsibilities; grounded in our spiritual and physical relationship to our lands and our ancestry.

The Shared Responsibility Agreement ideology should go beyond just service delivery and better public sector outcomes. It needs to be seen by its architects as offering us potential to take the agreement-making idea to serious matters like a treaty or an agreement of reconciliation or a referendum to resolve the unfinished business.

We have two years in which to prepare ourselves for the planned reconciliation convention. If we as a nation have the courage and the leadership capable of re-engaging on the road to genuine reconciliation and justice, then there will be many who will seize the opportunity to move forward together.

If, as in the past, the re-engagement is to be token and mean-spirited, then it will become the road less travelled, and Australians will have to bide their time until new leaders with the necessary courage and vision come forward to confront the inevitable resolution of our unfinished business.

We as Aboriginal peoples had survived for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of the colonisers. We have survived despite the dispossession and mendicant status to which we have been reduced.

Aboriginal people will continue to occupy that place deep within the national psyche that prevents this nation attaining true maturity, that reminds governments of their failure to engage us on just terms in the past, and that continues to demand a just settlement between our sovereign peoples.

The opportunity and the task lie before us. But do we have the courage and leadership to gift our children a truly reconciled and just future in one nation?

This is an edited extract from the speech given by Pat Dodson to the Reconciliation Australia conference yesterday.